1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to document and currency handling machines and, more particularly, to document handling machines with batching and sorting capabilities.
2. Prior Art
There have existed in the document and currency handling art machines in which sheet-by-sheet feeding of bills or documents which are vertically oriented is accomplished, in part, by a pusher plate which is biased towards the bills by a helical spring of a length approximating the length of the maximum number of bills in a stack to be handled. If it is desired, as here, to utilize a cartridge in which the bills have been stacked for easy insertion into the document handling machine, the length of the cartridge becomes very long if a helical spring is utilized. Further, because of inherent helical spring characteristics, towards the end of the feeding process when there are only a few bills left in the stack of vertically oriented bills or documents, the pressure from the pressure plate biased by the helical spring falls to a point where the bills or documents are not fed smoothly into the sheet-by-sheet mechanism, as a result of which jamming conditions and other undesirable conditions may arise. Further, in a document handling machine where such bills or documents are to be sorted as to fit and unfit or real or counterfeit it has been a practice in the past to stop the feeding of the machine with the counterfeit or defective bill as the last bill in the output or stacker from the document handling machine and then, manually, to remove the defective bill from the stacker. This is a slow process. With the advent of the ATM machines the need for pre-determined batches of bills which can be wrapped and supplied to ATM machine owners and, subsequently, to the users of those machines, it is essential that high-speed sorting and batching be achieved without any manual steps other than the original loading of unseparated bills into the handling machine and removal of a batch of a pre-determined number and with assured quality from the machine at the end of the batching process.
Therefore, it is a first object of this invention to overcome the various problems of prior art devices, as described hereinbefore.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a document handling machine in which the feeding of documents out of the input stack is assured of being consistent and free of jamming despite the position of a bill or document in the input stack.
It is an additional object of this invention to provide a document or currency handling machine which automatically segregates defective documents or bills from good bills without stopping the action of the machine to manually remove a bad document or bill.